Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, as the first of three boys to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy.[3] His father's MississippiProtestant family included his uncle LeRoy Percy, a U.S. Senator, and LeRoy Pope Percy, a Civil War hero. In February 1917, his grandfather committed suicide, setting a family pattern of emotional struggle and deaths that would haunt Percy throughout his life.

In 1929, when Percy was 13, his father committed suicide.[3] His mother took the family to her mother's home in Athens, Georgia. Two years later, Percy's mother died when she drove a car off a country bridge and into Deer Creek near Leland, Mississippi. Percy regarded this death as another suicide.[4] Walker and his two younger brothers, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin), moved to Greenville, Mississippi, where their second cousin William Alexander Percy, a bachelor lawyer and poet, became their guardian.

Percy was raised as an agnostic, though he was nominally affiliated with a theologically liberal Presbyterian church.[5] William Percy introduced him to many writers and poets and to a neighboring boy his own age, Shelby Foote, who became his lifelong best friend.[6] Later, he and his wife would both join the Roman Catholic Church. Percy insisted on being confirmed with the children as a sign of his new life.

As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to William Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. But when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak to him. He later recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch.

During this period, Percy read the works of the Danish existentialist writer Søren Kierkegaard and the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. He began to question the ability of science to explain the basic mysteries of human existence. Having been influenced by the example of one of his college roommates to rise daily at dawn and go to Mass, Percy decided to convert, and he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1947.[7]

He married Mary Bernice Townsend, a medical technician, on November 7, 1946. Fearing that he was sterile, the married couple adopted their first daughter, Mary Pratt. They later managed to conceive their second daughter Ann, who was deaf from an early age. The family settled in Covington, Louisiana. Percy's wife and one of their daughters had a bookstore, where he often wrote in an office on the second floor.

After many years of writing and rewriting in collaboration with editor Stanley Kauffmann, Percy published his first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961. Percy later wrote of the novel that it was the story of "a young man who had all the advantages of a cultivated old-line southern family: a feel for science and art, a liking for girls, sports cars, and the ordinary things of the culture, but who nevertheless feels himself quite alienated from both worlds, the old South and the new America."[11]

In 1989, the University of Notre Dame awarded Percy its Laetare Medal, which is bestowed annually to a Catholic "whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church, and enriched the heritage of humanity."[13]

Harwell, David Horace, Walker Percy Remembered: A Portrait in the Words of Those Who Knew Him. University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Samway, Patrick, Walker Percy: A Life. Loyola Press USA, 1999.

Tolson, Jay, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Wood, Ralph C, The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender & The Southern Imagination. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

_____. The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family. Oxford University Press USA, 1994.

Swirski. Peter, "We Better Kill the Instinct to Kill Before It Kills Us or Violence, Mind Control, and Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome". American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York, Routledge 2011.